Category: All Posts

Office 12 – Enterprise Content Management Topics

Enterprise Content Management Document Management in Office System (Presenter: Rhae-Christie Shaw) Most companies are suffering from information overload including challenges finding or sharing corporate knowledge. This session will include topics aimed at helping you understand how Office can assist in meeting your corporate content management needs. Applying Office workflow solutions...

Office 12 – Developer Related Topics

 Developer What’s new in Office 12 and WSS v3 for developers (Presenters: Joe Andreshak/Mike Fitzmaurice) This will be a detail-oriented “what’s new” assuming that the attendee knows something about developing in Office 11 and WSS v2. Creating Office application customizations with Visual Studio Tools for Office v3 (Presenters: Drew Lytle/Andrew...

Office 12 – Data & Business Intelligence Related Topics

 Data & Business Intelligence Office 12 Business Intelligence overview (Eran Megiddo) This session will introduce the Business Intelligence investments we have made in Excel, Visio, and SharePoint and explain how they integrate with the overall Microsoft BI platform and strategy. Analyzing and visualizing data using Excel 12 (Presenter: Allan Folting) Learn how...

Office 12 – Client Deployment Related Topics

 Client Deployment Understanding a language-neutral/multi-MSI design & multilanguage deployments (Presenters: Brad Corob/Amanda Hartin) This session will cover:· Benefits of a language-neutral architecture· The multi-MSI design· Using the Office 12 setup controller and admin drag-and-drop· World-wide deployment of multiple products and multiple languages Tools and strategies for getting through Office 12...

Welcome to my CSC private blog

A number of people within CSC who read my public blog have started to ask me how we go about improving communication around emerging technologies and concepts within CSC. At the moment too much knowledge is locked up in peoples heads, and where it is briefed it is to a...

Gmail Journal, Streamload, and secure blogging

I have made three major changes to my working practice today: I have setup a StreamLoad account which provides me with UNLIMITED storage and 1GB a month of download capacity for $4.95.  I am in the process of uploading my entire software library and music library,  my photo’s have already...

Productive Friction and Innovation

FrictionIn some recent discussions I have been introduced to the concept of “productive friction”, which is an effect that’s created when team members with a diverse background get together.  It happens for example when people from different cultures or academic disciplines or companies work together to solve a problem and it increases the level of innovation.  John Hagel describes it in his book The Only Sustainable Edge and in his Article in the Harvard Business Review.

This recent article in Newsweek describes the effect,  and gives some practical and simple advice on how to take advantage of it in your projects:

What they found was that the most successful teams did two things right. First, they attracted a mixture of experienced people and those who were newcomers to whichever field they were in. That’s not surprising–the need for fresh blood has long been recognized as an important ingredient in success. The second criterion, though, was far less obvious. What successful teams had in common was at least a few experienced members who had never collaborated with each other. “People have a tendency to want to work with their friends–people they’ve worked with before,” says Luis Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern …

So much happening in the real-time collaboration space

Only a few minutes ago I posted about developments in VOIP and Sametime integration,  then we get the Microsoft Live Meeting 2005 add-in:

Live Meeting Add-in for Outlook
With the Live Meeting Add-in for Outlook, you can:

  • Schedule a Live Meeting from Outlook
  • Identify individual meeting participants as attendees or presenters
  • Send separate invitations for attendees and for presenters
  • Specify default meeting options and override those defaults for specific meetings

Live Meeting Add-in for Office Collaboration
With the Office Collaboration Add-in, you can start a Meet Now meeting directly from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, or Project. The document appears in an application sharing session.

Live Meeting Add-in for Instant Messaging
If the recipient also has the Live Meeting Add-in Pack installed, you can start a Live Meeting from Windows Messenger or from MSN Messenger.

Vista beta 1 on its way

WinVista_v_ThumbI just started my downloads of Longhorn beta 1,  or Windows Vista:

  • Client
  • Server
  • IE 7 for XP
  • Release notes
  • How do I? documents

Simple model of personality type in business

PeopleAndre has this simple and easy to interpret model for classifying people in business:

    1. Builders – At the front of every train you typically have the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are all about ‘what could be’. They envision the world the way they want to create it and then set out to make that vision a reality. Entrepreneurs are typically described as both visionary or charismatic.
    2. Executers – In the middle car you have those that were born to execute. Executers might not brainstorm your next innovation, but once an idea is hatched, they can execute the heck out of it.
    3. Protectors – At the back of the train you have the protector. Neither innovation nor execution mean anything to a protector, who is motivated only to protect and guard what’s already been won in terms of assets. Protectors are better at saying “no” than anything else, for fear that any movement might somehow diminish or dwindle what’s been harvested by those before them.

It’s a lot easier to interpret than many models I have seem.